Pixel advertising

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This article is about Web advertising. For other uses, see Pixel (disambiguation).
The Million Dollar Homepage, the original and most successful pixel advertising site.
The Million Dollar Homepage, the original and most successful pixel advertising site.

Pixel advertising is a form of display advertising on the web, in which the cost of each advertisement is calculated dependent on the number of pixels it occupies.

Pixel advertising gained popularity in the last quarter of 2005 when British student Alex Tew created a website named The Million Dollar Homepage, and solicited advertisers to buy ad space measured in pixels on the homepage. The price was set at $1 USD per pixel, and there were 1 million pixels of space available. In approximately five months all of the ad space was sold and Tew had made over one million dollars. This made news worldwide and gained public and business interest in pixel ads.

Many web sites which host pixel ads exist in a variety of compositions. As a general rule, they follow Tew's example by selling pixel ads in 100 pixel "blocks" as "cell ad" because this is the smallest size to reasonably display anything meaningful, and remain easily clickable. A few newer sites have additional features that allows a larger image to appear when visitors hover the cursor over the small pixel ad, while others allow pixel ads to be bought for a temporary period of time.

Tew's million dollar success sparked the development of various ‘Do it yourself’ pixel scripts such as the Million Pixel Script and GPix Pixel Ad Script. These scripts made it possible for people with little knowledge or skills to implement a pixel ad system on their website. This has sparked the growth of thousands of pixel websites worldwide.

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